Business Intelligence (BI) generally refers to a category of software systems and applications used to improve business enterprise decision-making and governance. These software tools provide techniques for analyzing and leveraging enterprise applications and data. They are commonly applied to financial, human resource, marketing, sales, service provision, customer, and supplier analyses. More specifically, Business Intelligence tools can include reporting and analysis tools to analyze, forecast and present information, content delivery infrastructure systems to deliver, store and manage reports and analytics, data warehousing systems to cleanse and consolidate information from disparate sources (e.g., machines), integration tools to analyze and generate workflows based on enterprise systems, database management systems to organize, store, retrieve and manage data in databases, such as relational, Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) and Online Analytic Processing (OLAP) databases, and performance management applications to provide business metrics, dashboards, and scorecards, as well as best-practice analysis techniques for gaining business insights.
OLAP data sources and tools are a subset of BI tools. OLAP tools are report generation tools and are otherwise suited to ad hoc analyses. OLAP generally refers to a technique of providing fast analysis of shared multidimensional information stored in a database. OLAP systems provide a multidimensional conceptual view of data, including full support for hierarchies and multiple hierarchies.
OLAP is typically implemented in a multi-user client/server mode to offer consistently rapid responses to queries. OLAP helps the user synthesize information through use of an OLAP server that is specifically designed to support and operate on multidimensional data sources. The querying process for OLAP can involve, depending on the specific implementation, writing and executing a query. Multidimensional Expressions (“MDX”) is a query language for OLAP databases, like SQL is a query language for relational databases. Thus, an MDX statement can be used to query for a result from an OLAP data source, e.g., an OLAP data cube.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,255,368 B2 describes a computer readable storage medium comprising executable instructions to receive user-created data for user-specified positions in an OLAP hierarchy. The OLAP hierarchy is reorganized according to the user-created data. Data manipulation statements are generated to evaluate a set of members of the OLAP hierarchy according to the user-specified positions.